Web performance is a very important issue for both businesses and consumers. Fast internet allows businesses to showcase their wares to a broader audiences whilst consumers can access online content such as high definition video and software downloads quickly and efficiently. Both improve end user satisfaction whilst resulting in generally higher profits for business that rely on the internet for their trade.

As such, it is important for nations to keep their network infrastructure up to date and performing optimally. A good measure of the speed of a country’s network infrastructure, and therefore the web performance its citizens and businesses could expect to enjoy, can be gleamed from Akamai’s State of the Internet report. This comprehensive report produced by one of the world’s leading content delivery network providers, produced quarterly, measures various metrics to determine where in the world web performance is highest.

Traditionally, advanced Asian economies such as Korea and Japan topped the list of average and peak traffic speeds, with powerhouses such as the USA and European nations rounding off the top 10 and low teens. However, Akamai’s latest report, from the third quarter of 2014, show that Uruguay has charged up the rankings to become a serious contender to traditionally strong networks.

Web Performance Increase

In fact, Urugauy’s peak web performance even beat the United States, as well as Taiwan, with a peak speed of 58.6 Mbps compared to 48.8 Mbps for the US and 55.1 Mbps for Taiwan. This put Uruguay at number 7 in the world. When looking at average speeds, however, Uruguay performed less well, with a speed of 5.5 Mbps compared to the US at 11.5 Mbps and Canada at 10.3 Mbps. This still means that Urugauy has the 3rd best web performance in the Americas, and the best in South America.

This news will be welcomed by Antel, the state owned telecoms Company that has met the 3,015% increase in use of broadband services since Q3 2013. Far from being the victim of poor web performance because of this demand, the company has risen to the challenge and created extra capacity to ensure that congestion has not been an issue.